Youtube Keyword Research Tool for Video SEO

Mark R Robertson   |   June 23, 2008   |  

youtube keywordOver the course of the past year, I have had at least 10 people ask me whether I was aware of any online keyword research tools that specifically focused on keyword suggestions for online video marketing.  Trust me, I’ve asked everyone I know…  I have even put in requests to some of the popular online keyword research companies with no indication that such a tool was being developed.

About a month ago, Youtube released its “YouTube Suggest” enhanced search functionality which doubles as an excellent video marketing keyword suggestion tool for doing keyword research on Youtube.   Essentially, this feature uses predictive text to display popular query suggestions (in order of search volume) in the Youtube search box.

The functionality is turned on by default but you can enable it and disable it via the Youtube advanced search settings link:

youtube keyword research Youtube Keyword Research Tool for Video SEO

Here is a screenshot of the suggestion functionality in action:

youtube suggest

By using Youtube Suggest, you can gain insight into how users are searching on Youtube and which queries are most often performed.  These keyword suggestions can then be used to add to your video in order to increase the chances of targeting the largest possible relevant audience.

You will notice that this feature is very much the same thing that you see when using Google Suggest, which has been available on Google Labs for some time. In fact, Youtube is using the Google Suggest functionality to power the Youtube Suggestions.  Because this is the case, you can also get these same suggestions by using the following JSON call, where q=the term being searched:
http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search? hl=en&ds=yt&json=t&jsonp=callbackfunction&q=orange+county+ca

This past week, I read an excellent post on this by Bryson Meunier, where he goes into depth about how to properly do keyword research, in particular, for Youtube.  Bryson does a great job of explaining how current keyword research tools are insufficient if you are looking to discover keyword suggestions specific to Youtube and online video.

“The problem with doing keyword research for videos this way is that the most popular queries in WordTracker, which takes its data from meta search engines, are not necessarily the most popular queries in YouTube. In fact, in most cases they’re probably entirely dissimilar.”

Bryson also goes into some very interesting research that he did using the youtube suggestions in order to determine the top query categories in youtube.

“By far the most popular category on YouTube was Arts & Entertainment, of which music searches made up the bulk. No real surprises here. Nonetheless, there are popular categories outside this category that brands looking to get into video SEO should consider. This is also a study of head queries, so the long tail of video SEO could vary…”

Topics: , , ,
Posted: in Tools & Software, Video Marketing, Video SEO (VSEO)
About the Author - Mark R Robertson
Mark Robertson is the Founder and Creator of ReelSEO.com. Mark has had extensive experience in online marketing, particularly in Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Local Search, Video Marketing, and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). You can follow Mark on Twitter @markrrobertson

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  • Good post and good tip. Im sure it'll come handy some day. Thx.
  • It is interesting to know this new feature of YouTube..it can be very helpful for site owners who are doing SEO on their sites.
  • Rapid Keyword www.rapidkeyword.com ($70 US) uses google suggest to drive one if its reporting tools. It's a heck of a lot easier than trying to screen grab the suggest results. Not affiliated just like the tool and thought I'd share...
  • Search suggest is an awesome way to find quality keywords and phrases. Pretty cool how it can even be tailored to video suggest, product suggest, location suggest and more. There's literally a goldmine of words stored. The only downfall is whether or not the words are being queried often enough to generate some conversions, but definitely a good place to generate ideas.

    Recently we developed our own tool for keyword research in-house, which is now offered for free on our website. It provides search suggestions based on a root word or phrase, alternatively checks rankings for results and provides counts for popular words and phrases. Thought your readers interested in this post may find it useful. We encourage feedback and suggestions, so please let us know what you think. Great post.

    http://www.visible.net/tools/keywords/
  • Tom
    Good to know! ... it has been there for quite a long time but I haven't realized how useful it can be for website owners
  • I've been using this tool not for the past few months after reading this post. HUGE HELP! I'm starting to feel like I actually know what I'm doing here.
  • Interesting post. Is there still no keyword research tool available in 2009?

    From personal experience, I know that you can score high on terms that have give few results. I was responsible for the Rabo SportTV channel on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/rabosporttv). Currently, Rabo SportTV dominates SERPs in YouTube on 'Paardensport' (=horseback riding) and 'Wielrennen' (=cycling), but not on 'Hockey'.

    This success has everything to do with the limited number of results for these Dutch terms (except hockey, which 227.000 results), the metadata used and I presume also the fact that you must upload regularly and consistently.
  • I'm going to check out the visiblenet link.

    Definitely the suggestion you made with the search box helped. Thanks for the input. Learning as I'm going.

    Would like to be the go to video site for visitors of Miami Beach & those that wish they could visit. :)

    Thank thank you!
  • BrandedChannels, when & how did you make the switch to be a YouTube Partner? Pretty cool. I didn't understand anything of course, but I liked the channel.

    Mine is http://youtube.com/goLIVEmiami I'm at 62 subscribers & growing. Going to work on my key words.
  • @goLIVEmiami: youtube.com/brandedchannels is not a partner channel (yet), though I have used photoshop to optimize the background image.

    Check out this post on my site to find a photoshop template: http://www.brandedchannels.com/2009/02/27/upgra...

    Cheers,

    Richard
  • Awesome! I can't wait to try it out. I'm sure that the most popular search terms on YouTube are different from the most popular search terms on other search engines!
  • envixa
    Good sugestion. I was also searching for keywords research tools for youtube.
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